Clinton Wants to Improve Ties With Israel

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told a representative of a group of prominent Jewish leaders on Sunday that she wanted to put the relationship between the United States and Israel back on “constructive footing,” the representative said.

Mrs. Clinton’s comments, made in a phone call to Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, contrasted in tone from recent remarks by members of the Obama administration, who have publicly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel amid tensions over a nuclear deal with Iran and comments Mr. Netanyahu made in the final days of his re-election campaign this month.

“Secretary Clinton thinks we need to all work together to return the special U.S.-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests, including a two-state solution pursued through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians,” Mr. Hoenlein said in a statement issued by his organization on Sunday evening. “We must ensure that Israel never becomes a partisan issue,” he quoted her as saying. Mrs. Clinton knows Mr. Hoenlein from her time in the Senate.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton confirmed that she had spoken to Mr. Hoenlein, but would not elaborate on what they had discussed or say if he had quoted her accurately.

Mrs. Clinton’s comments are her first on the United States- Israeli relationship to be made public since Mr. Netanyahu’s re-election on March 17, when the strains between the two countries reached their height in the days surrounding the election. Mr. Netanyahu urged supporters to counter Israeli Arabs who he said were voting in “droves,” comments widely criticized as racist, and asserted that no Palestinian state would be established on his watch, a statement that President Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, called “very troubling.”

After his victory, Mr. Netanyahu backed off both statements. Obama administration officials have left open the possibility of changing the United States’ stance on Israel at the United Nations since the election. Historically, the United States has acted as a shield for resolutions that Israel found troublesome.

A senior White House official was quoted by The Wall Street Journal recently suggesting that some in the Obama administration felt “personally sold out,” after accusations that Israel had spied on negotiations for an Iran nuclear deal and that those aides could be around for the “next administration,” a clear reference to a potential Clinton White House.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Clinton Wants to Improve Ties With Israel. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe